Cody read the fourth book in the Dirty Harry series.
DIRTY HARRY #4: THE MEXICO KILL by Dane Hartman
When Clint Eastwood said he was done with the Dirty Harry franchise after the third film, The Enforcer (he would later return for two more movies), Warner Bros. decided to order a series of books that revolved around the character of San Francisco-based Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan, hiring two separate authors, Ric Meyers and Leslie Alan Horvitz, to pump out a combined total of twelve books under the pseudonym Dane Hartman. I have now read four of the twelve books, and while I don’t know which author wrote which book, I’ve gotten the impression that the first two books were written by one of the authors, while the second two have been written by the other. There are slight differences in how Harry is written in the first two books compared to the second two, and the authors also have different ways of describing violent acts. There was so much blood and guts flying around in the first two books, it was like the writer was imagining Dirty Harry movies with special FX provided by Tom Savini. There are still instances of blood and guts (and brains) getting splattered around in the second two books, but the descriptions have a different feeling to them. The writer of the second two books also likes to show off his vocabulary a little more than his predecessor.
This is how we get passages like this one: “The .44 bullet entered (character’s) skull at a point just above his left eyebrow. When it exited, it flung against the back wall a thick spattering of his brains to which bone chips adhered tenaciously.” And when that now-brainless fellow hits the ground, he does so with “his arms outstretched like a supplicant.”
Maybe my author assumptions are wrong and the writers have managed to pull a fast one on me, but the feeling I get when reading the books is that Duel for Cannons and Death on the Docks came from one writer and The Long Death and The Mexico Kill came from another. And while all of the books are entertaining, I prefer the first two over the second two.
The Mexico Kill drops Harry into a story fitting for a film noir movie. When a wealthy man named Harold Keepnews loses a fishing boat to drug-running pirates, he asks Harry Callahan – who manages to get suspended from the police force due to an interaction with a drug dealer very early in the book – to pose as a crew member on another one his boats so they can thwart these criminals and hopefully disrupt their drug-running business. This boat trip takes Harry to a village in Mexico, thus the title of the book. My film noir reference is due to the fact that Keepnews has a crumbling marriage to an attractive trophy wife who has had a tendency to cheat on him... and before he sets out on his boat trip, even Harry manages to fall prey to her seductive ways. Mrs. Keepnews, Wendy, may not be a drug-runner, but she certainly finds ways to cause trouble as the story plays out, and gets multiple people into dangerous situations.
Whoever wrote this story did manage to craft an interesting story, but it didn’t really feel like a Dirty Harry story through and through. Any generic detective or private investigator could have been in Harry’s place and it wouldn’t have made any difference, it could have been written in exactly the same way. I didn’t get the Harry Callahan / Clint Eastwood vibe from the lead character as much as I did from previous entries in this series... but it stands to reason that the characterization would be weaker in some of the books than in others. The two writers were rushing through these for-hire jobs at a breakneck pace, the twelve books were published over a period of just nineteen months, so a fluctuation in quality and franchise accuracy is to be expected.
Even though I couldn’t imagine Harry in a lot of it, I did enjoy reading The Mexico Kill, as the story held my interest and there was plenty of action.
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